From the working of gold nuggets, or of virgin copper, with the hammer, to the smelting of the ores, was no trifling step; but that knowledge once gained, the threshold of civilisation and true progress had been reached. The history of the grand achievement is embodied in the earliest myths both of the Old and the New World. Tubal-cain, Dædalus, Hephæstus, Vulcan, Vœlund, Galant, the Luno or the Celtic Fingal, and Wayland, the Saxon smith-god, are but legendary variations of the first worker by whom the gift of metallurgy was communicated to man; and so too the New World has its Quetzalcoatl, or Vœlund of the Aztecs, the divine instructor of their ancestors in the use of the metals. But whatever be the date of this wise instructor, no share of the knowledge communicated by him to that favoured race appears to have ever penetrated northward of the Mexican Gulf.
It is vain to urge such dubious evidence as the fancied traces of a mould-ridge, or the solitary example of a casting of uncertain age, in proof of a knowledge of the furnace and the crucible among any North American tribe. Everywhere in Europe the soil yields not only its buried relics of gold, copper, and bronze, but also stone and bronze moulds in which implements and personal ornaments were cast. When the ingenious systematising of Danish archæologists had familiarised the students of antiquity with the idea of a succession of Stone, Bronze, and Iron periods in the history of Europe, the question naturally followed, whether metallurgy did not begin, there, as elsewhere, in the easy working of virgin copper. Dr. Latham accordingly remarked, in his Ethnology of the British Islands, on the supposition that no unalloyed copper relics had been found in Britain: “Stone and bone first; then bronze, or copper and tin combined; but no copper alone. I cannot get over this hiatus; cannot imagine a metallurgic industry beginning with the use of alloys.” It was a mistake, however, to assume that no copper relics had ever been found. At first it had been taken for granted that all such implements were of the familiar alloy. But so soon as the importance of the distinction was recognised, examples of pure copper were forthcoming. So early as 1822, Sir David Brewster described a large axe of peculiar shape, and formed of copper, which was found in the hard black till-clay at a depth of twenty feet under Ratho Bog, near Edinburgh. This is no solitary example. The Scottish Museum of Antiquities has other implements of pure copper; and Sir William Wilde states in reference to the collections of the Royal Irish Academy: “upon careful examination, it has been found that thirty of the rudest, and apparently the very oldest celts, are of red, almost unalloyed copper”; as is also the case with some other rudely formed tools in the same collection.
It was a temporary advantage, doubtless, but a real loss, to the Indian miners of Lake Superior that they found the native copper there ready to hand, a pure ductile metal, probably regarded by them as only a variety of stone which—unlike its rocky matrix,—they could bend, or hammer into shape, without fracture. Its value as such was widely appreciated. Copper tools, everywhere retaining the specs, or larger crystals of silver, characteristic of the Lake Superior veins, tell of the diffusion of the metal from that single source throughout all the vast regions watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries, and eastward by lake and river to the gulf of the St. Lawrence and the mouth of the Hudson.
There was a time when this traffic must have been systematically carried on; when the ancient miners of Lake Superior worked its rich copper veins with industrious zeal; and when, probably as part of the same aggressive energy, the valley of the Ohio was filling with a settled population; its great earthworks were in process of construction, and a native race entered on a course that gave promise of social progress. But, from whatever cause, the work of the old miners was abruptly terminated;[[78]] the race of the Mounds vanished from the scenes of their ingenious toil; and rudest barbarism resumed its sway over the whole northern continent. The same Aryan race that, before the dawn of history, before the Sanskrit-speaking people of India, or the Zends of Persia, entered on their southern homes, spoke in its own cradleland the mother tongue of Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic, and German, at length broke up and went forth on its long wanderings. Whatever peoples it found there; they were replaced by Celts, Romans, Greeks, Slavs, and Teutons, who broke in upon the barbarism of prehistoric Europe; displaced the older races, Allophylian, Neolithic, Iberian, Finnic, or by whatever other name we may find it convenient to designate them; but not without a considerable intermingling of the old blood with that of the intruders. The sparsely settled continent gradually filled up. Forests were cleared, swamps drained, rivers confined by artificial banks and levées to their channels; and there grew up in their new homes the Celtic, Classic, Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, with all the varied culture and civilisation which they represent. Agriculture, the special characteristic of the whole Aryan race, flourished. They brought with them the cereals; and, with plenty, the favoured race multiplied, till at length it has grown straitened within the bounds of the old continent which it had made its own.
With the close of the fifteenth century one great cycle, that of Europe’s mediæval era, came to an end; and then we trace the first beginnings of that fresh scattering of the Aryan clan, and its new western movement across the Ocean. It seems in a very striking manner once more to repeat itself under our own eyes, as we look abroad on the millions crowding from Europe and filling up the western wilderness; hewing down the forests, cultivating the waste prairies, and everywhere displacing the rude aborigines: yet here also not without some interblending of the races; though the two types, Aryan and pre-Aryan, meet under all the repellent influences of high civilisation and the lowest barbarism. In the Canadian North-West alone, the young province of Manitoba began its political existence with a population of between 10,000 and 12,000 half-breeds; in part at least, a hardy race of hunters and farmers; the representatives of what is as certainly destined to constitute an element in the new phases which the Aryan race already begins to assume, under the diverse conditions of a new continent, as that curious trace of Europe’s pre-Aryan people which attracted the observant attention of Tacitus among the ancient Britons; and which we are learning to recognise, with a new significance, as the Melanochroi: the representatives of the old half-breed of Europe’s prehistoric dawn.
| [40] | Gladstone, Juventus Mundi, pp. 474, 479. |
| [41] | Indian Migrations, p. 24. |
| [42] | Types of Mankind, p. 351. |
| [43] | Early Man in Britain, p. 241. |